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A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad cover

A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad

Chapter 4: A SONG OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE

By F. W. Harvey

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About This Book

This collection gathers poems composed by a soldier at the Front that alternate between affectionate dialect songs celebrating Gloucestershire landscapes, traditions and pastimes and sober battlefield reflections on comradeship, sacrifice, and homesickness. Short formal pieces—ballades, trios, sonnets—and prose poems shift between light conviviality and stark moral questioning, often anchoring wartime anxiety in images of orchards, rivers and village life. Recurring themes include longing for home, the weight of witnessing death, gratitude, defiance, and the effort to reconcile pastoral memory with the experience of combat, producing verses that balance local humor and song with solemn meditation.

A SONG OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE

(Dedicated to the Gloucestershire Society)

North, South, East, and West:

Think of whichever you love the best.

Forest and vale and high blue hill:

You may have whichever you will,

And quaff one cup to the love o’ your soul

Before we drink to the lovely whole.

Here are high hills with towns all stone,

(Did you come from the Cotswolds then?)

And an architecture all their own,

And a breed of sturdy men.

But here’s a forest old and stern,

(Say, do you know the Wye?)

Where sunlight dapples green miles of fern,

A river wandering by.

Here’s peaceful meadow-land and kine,

(Do you see a fair grey tower?)

Where sweet together close entwine

Grass, clover, and daisy flower.

Here stretches the land toward the sea

(Behold the castle bold!)

Where men live out life merrily,

And die merry and old.

North, South, East, and West:

Think of whichever you love the best.

Forest and vale and high blue hill:

You shall have whichever you will,

To quaff one cup to the love o’ your soul

Before we drink to the lovely whole.